Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking, link exchanges, etc. we all receive emails from people saying how wonderful they think our website is and how they would love to exchange a link with us. Why are they doing this?

What is the value of linking? How did this come about? Well, you can blame Google for these emails. In the beginning, before Google, search engine algorithms were basing their results on website’s static content and their metatags. For example if the information you had on your site made sense to the spider and your title tag matched the keyword the consumer typed in to the search engine, you may have received major rankings.

Then came Google and the world of web results was changed. Google wanted there to be more variables in deciding what results to display. In addition, they wanted the public to have a say in which websites received top placement in their search results.

To create this “equal playing field” they created a system which not only evaluated the content on your website but also started evaluating links. The links they reviewed were the links coming into your website from other websites and the links that were on your website to other websites. How this worked was a bit of genius. What they had done was created a democratic voting system. By other websites linking to your website, that was considered a vote for your site.

Google had realized that with over one million web pages launched every day on the internet, there was no way one organization could keep track of and accurately rate all these websites. However, by creating an automated system which is based not only on content but also on a democratic voting system, they would be providing the most relevant and up to date information to their users. For example from Google’s perspective it was like “we like you, people like you, you must be a good site’ and rankings you shall receive.

Website owners then realized in a short period of time that they needed to get links to their website and the more links they had, the better rankings they would receive. From this theory, reciprocal linking was born.

Reciprocal linking is a link exchange between two web pages. Let’s use real estate as an example. Bob in Florida has a website and he emails John in New Mexico and they agree to link to each other. This works because from their perspective they aren’t competing with each other and the resulting link benefits both agents. This all seems fine and appropriate but then people started creating products to serve the needs of the reciprocal marketer. Instead of analyzing the value of a proposed link exchange, people started trading links for links sake and the value of the links were decreased. Is Bob linking to John because he likes his site or is he linking to John to get a link in return? In most cases people were just trying to get as many links as possible thus being self serving. People starting linking to anyone and everyone without caring what the site represented. This became a problem because it started to pollute Google’s results.

No longer could Google rely on the website owner to provide them with links because they liked other websites. So then Google decided to change the algorithm to better value the link voting system they had created. In order to fix the problem they started to primarily validate one way back links.

For example if John links to Bob and Bob links to John then they cancel each other out and are devalued in Google’s eyes. Now what Google wanted was for Bob to link to John because John offered information that Bob deemed good information to provide his customers, not just because he received a link in return.

This worked for awhile until after a short period of time online marketing companies tried to trick Google again using link farms. A link farm is a page with hundreds of links on it pointing to various other websites with no rhyme or reason. The sole purpose of the page was to create false back links to a website.

This strategy was easy for Google to discover and crack down upon and when they discovered websites using this technique, Google would then ban them which meant they would not show up in the search results.

Google then realized that since they still wanted to promote the linking strategy between websites, they needed to create a tool which would allow website owners to decide which websites would be the best for them to link to.

This is why the Page Rank tool was created. The theory was that if you link to websites with a high PR (page rank), then other website owners could know if it was worth linking to a third party website.

Click here to download the Google toolbar in order to see your website’s page rank is.

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So what does this all mean? It means that linking is still very important and reciprocal linking has value but very little unless it is industry related and the link is coming from a quality website. Your focus in regard to linking should be to get industry related websites to link to your website. Note: Make sure that the website is quality.

For New Agents: If you do not understand linking or are interested in our consulting program which is designed to train real estate agents on how to inspect a website before linking. PLEASE CLICK HERE

For Webmasters: Scroll down to see a list of some of our recommended link partners:

Coronado Real Estate - KathyKoop.com